The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (books you have to read txt) 📕

‘And he’s kept your secret?’

Emma shrugged her shoulders. ‘I s’pose.’

He hadn’t. And Simon did the only thing he could think of. He dropped Emma off at the cathedral gates on the way home.

This time Simon’s message had been urgent. ‘Please, Bea, I need you to talk to Emma now. Today. It was a huge mistake taking her to that house. She’s in an awful state.’

Hilde was dressed very simply. Swathed in a woollen tunic, her hair covered in a veil, with no jewels or money and no possessions at all save a pilgrim’s scrip carrying a comb and spare linen and a letter for a king, she walked slowly along the track up and over the first high ridge and down into the foreign land of her people’s enemies. She had discussed the disguise she would adopt with her mistress and a pilgrim had seemed an obvious choice. The people of Powys were a God-fearing race, they had followed Christ from time immemorial, or so Eadburh told her, far longer than the people of Mercia, and they would respect a woman alone if she were protected by her service to God.

Hilde’s shoes grew dusty and soon wore thin. At first the people, accustomed to border raids, were suspicious of a fair-haired Saxon, even if she was a lone woman, as she asked her way, begging food and a place to sleep from shepherds and swineherds and cottars as she passed. Most were generous in the end. It had been a good harvest, there was bread to spare. Dogs were sometimes her enemy, appearing to suspect she was not what she seemed, but if she had to, she diverted out of their way, heading always towards the setting sun. On the first night at a tiny farmstead, a farmer cut her a thumb stick to help her on her way. Two days later, at a clas, a small church community isolated in a deep valley, the gentle old abbot gave her a carved wooden cross to hang around her neck on a thong. Everywhere, scattered through the lonely country she found there were churches and chapels and crossroads marked by high crosses of intricately laced stonework, every one a place of refuge.

She walked west to start with, anxious to put Mercia behind her, afraid that they might come after her, but there was never any sign of pursuit and the further she walked the more she fell into her role as a woman of God and the more the role settled on her, the more she began to think about the terrible thing she had done. Every heather bell and every bloom on the gorse bushes where a bee paused to suck the nectar, reminded her of the bee upon the bank of the river and the sting which was inflicted by her hand.

When there was nowhere to stay, she curled under a hedge or in a dry ditch, swathed in her cloak and she prayed. She was lost but she no longer cared. When she found her destination, she was instructed to find out who had killed the man Eadburh had loved, and then, armed with the truth, go back all that long way into Mercia to find him. In her hem was the remaining small package, another lethal bee sting to inflict, another vengeful death to take the man who had killed a prince to Hell, another weight upon her conscience.

As she penetrated further into the kingdom of Powys following a barely defined track that led northwards now through valleys between the mountains, the people greeted her almost everywhere with courtesy and friendship. By now she had learned a few words of their language and the inhabitants of the small lonely cottages grew even more hospitable, sharing their dry bracken beds, piles of woollen blankets and sheepskins to give her warmth as summer declined into autumn, pottage to eat and stories to tell by the fireside at night even though she understood only a few words. She was puzzled that there seemed to be no villages on the road, which wound its way more and more deeply into the mountains, where she heard wolves howling at night and eagles calling in the day as they swept high amongst the cloud-covered peaks. She passed lonely steadings and on the tops of some of the mountains she saw castles and palisades and she would feel a ray of hope, but again and again people shook their heads when she asked for the king’s court and again they pointed her onward.

Time passed. She learned to hide her loneliness, always hoping that soon she would reach her destination, wondering now if she was walking round in circles. Then at last puzzled faces and eloquent signs of incomprehension were replaced by nods of encouragement. Soon she would be there, they seemed to say. She prayed to the Blessed Virgin to watch over her and learned the names of new and unknown saints to add to her list of protectors.

One day, as the track descended into a broad river valley she saw signs of a larger church, surrounded by dry stone walls and buildings with fields around them and there she stayed for several weeks as a guest of the abbess, regaining her strength and her resolve. This lady spoke her language and was kind, welcoming a new face and inviting her to stay as the cold winds swept in, carrying ice and snow, screaming through the rounded arches of the abbey. She thought sometimes of Eadburh waiting for news, always waiting for news as she had when she was a young princess, and she wavered, but Eadburh was safe and warm by the fires of the palaces of Wessex, and here in the frost dusted valleys the abbess cautioned her to wait until the weather cleared and then go on to find news of Prince Elisedd. When she spoke of him, the abbess